The Girls At Lunch

The Girls At Lunch

I have had this picture for seven years and have always loved it, but never really knew how to process it into something sharable. It was the occasion of my retirement luncheon in May of ‘02, in a room full of my friends at the Red, Hot & Blue on Wilson Blvd., Roslyn, Virginia, walking distance from the building I worked in over the Roslyn Metro Station. What a happy day that was, to celebrate the end of forty some years of work, the last twelve in a job that I loved, and to enjoy this wonderful gathering in my favorite eatery; gosh, how I miss those bbq ribs, that potato salad … and they did this fabulous thing with fried onion rings … mashed them into a loaf pan and baked it and served the onion loaf by the slice, mmmm.

This is one of the many shots I snapped that day with my very first digital camera, a Sony Mavica, which took snapshot-sized pictures at 72dpi on a 3.5” floppy disk; I really loved that camera. Given that the pixel count of this picture was quite low, I could not enlarge it without sacrificing a lot of detail so, instead, I decided to treat it to look entirely different, something like a cross between a grainy newspaper photo and a vintage snapshot.

Many layers later, with a different treatment to each one, and the opacity adjusted to blend them into a coherent whole, I finally have what I consider a worthy tribute to the Girls at Lunch. Cheers, Monica, Jennifer, Linda … I’m sorry, the one with your back turned, I’ve forgotten your name. Mea culpa. Senior moment.

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